The people behind Pascal

Although Pascal was created by professor Niklaus Wirth, several important figures
influenced the design or had direct contributions to it. In today's Internet
driven world, many of them have a "face" in terms of a web site and
collections of papers. This is your guide to the people behind the language
Pascal.

Niklaus Wirth

Professor Wirth created several languages, including Algol W, Pascal, Modula
and Oberon. Although retired, he presently works on FPGA programming.

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

Dijkstra is considered by most to be the father of structured programming.
In the article "A case
against the GO TO statement", Dijkstra outlined the methodology of
structured programming. Dijkstra spend his carreer in computer science avocating
for computer programming as a discipline. He is credited with the idea of monitors,
which are becoming increasingly important in todays multicore SMP world.

Perhaps Dijkstras most enduring legacy is that of being the one to state
the "emperor has no clothes". So much of Dijkstras work is spirited
criticisim (Dijkstra is both complementary and critical of Pascal), that it
is necessary to be an experienced Dijkstra reader to catch the flow of his work.Dijkstra
comes to the end of the push for an Ada standard with the comment:

"This concludes a month of most depressing work. Why does the world seem
to persist so stubbornly in being such a backward place? Why do people
refuse to learn from the past and why do they persist in making known
and well-identified mistakes again? It is all very saddening."

It is this very feeling that Dijkstra tells you exactly what was on his mind
that makes him one of my favorite authors on programming matters.

Sadly, Dijkstra is no longer with us. A biography and large collection of
his work exists at:

Tony Hoare

Sir Tony Hoare contributed many of the ideas and constructs of Pascal, including
the idea of binding pointers to their types and variables, an idea that would
later be reinvented as "managed pointers". Mr. Hoare is active in
research on parallel programming issues. He continues to speak for
cleanly structured programs.

Per Brinch Hansen

Professor Hansen created the language Concurrent Pascal, and has been instrumental
in advancing the idea of parallel programming as a fundamental language construct.
He advanced the idea of monitors, which he credits Dijkstra with the original
idea. Hansen is never afraid to put theory to practice. The concurrent Pascal
implementation was done on a PDP 11/45, and he immediately created an operating
system based on the language. Later he released an example compiler for the
IBM-PC 8086 series machine, showing that he was more interested in the use of
practical, available machines than the completion of ivory tower projects.

Until his passing in 2007, Professor Hansen was still active and publishes, and has spoken on the
loss of the ideas of secure parallel process programming. Today, with multicore
SMP programming growing day by day, Hansens work becomes more important, and
unfortunately many are rediscovering and reinventing his work today.